Using a Personal Knowledge Base To Enhance Learning
I began saving my schoolwork in high school as a resource to refer back to in order to study. Saving my work was especially useful for my Spanish classes, which built more and more upon themselves as the years progressed. By saving my work I could look back at basic grammar concepts to correct my writing, and review a map of South America that I had made for a quiz in my first year taking Spanish. I could also review the vocabulary that I had learned, and reflect on how much knowledge I had accumulated and how much my Spanish had improved throughout the year.
It was not until college that a professor told my class that we should start accumulating a library of reference for my major. No teacher or professor had told me that I should save my textbooks and work as a resource, although I had been doing it since high school. Since high school I have amassed boxes of old papers and textbooks from past classes that take up space in my parent’s basement; this tends to be a source of tension between my parents and I when someone wants to find something stored between my boxes of schoolwork. Now that I have been introduced to Evernote, I think how convenient it would be if I could store my thousands of loose-leaf class papers in a neat little hard drive that takes up less space than Reign of Error.
Technology is the development of innovated tools that make tasks easier than they were before. When we think about the definition of education now, we might say that someone is knowledgeable at a particular subject. Before the use of computers, we may have had a different concept of what it meant to be educated. Technology has a way of innervating our lives and forcing us to co-adapt. We can see now that without the up-to-date technology, it may be difficult to catch up when doing things the old fashioned way. For example, we now have the ability to dedicate tablets and phones specifically to reading, borrowing and purchasing books. We can turn pages with the flick of a button and we can save time on traveling to the bookstore. We have whatever we want, whenever we want it, in the palm of our hands. You can even bookmark books, change the font, and highlight directly on the screen. It would be much more difficult to travel to the library, borrow a book and then be restricted in the book’s use by a late fee. Not to mention it is more difficult to flip pages, and it is troublesome if you want to write a note or if you lose your bookmark.
Evernote is one of those technologies, like tablets, that uses innovative tools and the internet to make our lives much more convenient and increase the speed of acquisition of knowledge. It was a very helpful tool in this graduate course. I actually used Evernote less than I thought that I would have. I think that I wasn’t used to the note taking and reading style that Evernote allowed. Now that I see some of the things that I can do with this program, I imagine that it has boundless potential to help me in my future research and work. There is only one problem though: I have to purchase the program to do any more work! Evernote Web Clipper was especially useful because I could save everything I read and write a reaction summary to the articles. This allowed me to keep an online binder of all of the work that I had done, so that I could refer back to the work when I needed to cite something or remember something I had read.
As I became more comfortable with Evernote, I started clipping articles like mad. One of my weak points as a researcher is not being able to cite my sources and ideas. I clipped everything I had read because doing so helped me to feel secure that I had all of the knowledge at my fingertips. However, it was difficult for me to clip scholarly articles. They are so long that I worried about not getting every point in my summary. Also, I reached my max capacity in web clipper long before my research project, which deemed it rather unhelpful because I could not add my new information or scholarly articles.
Describe your PKB's organizational scheme. How many notebooks have you created? What (if any) tags are you using? What uses (if any) have you discovered for note links?
While using Evernote helped me to hold all of my notes in one place, my PKB has not had a specific organizational scheme. The Context Report clippings that I would save always have a “CR – “ in front of the title so that I know that they are specific to the Context Report, and they will sort according to title in the Evernote library. General articles from my Personal Knowledge Base have a “PKB –“ in front of the title, so that they will group together. I normally retrace my articles by date or sometimes by title.
When I first began using Evernote Web Clipper, I would add tags to my clippings. However, I found this to be more difficult because I had not built up a library and I was not sure how to organize it. I abandoned using tags because using the date that the article was clipped seemed easier to me. I was worried that Evernote would sort my clippings by the tags, but that the tags would either be unrelated or too related based on the tags. I guess you could say that I was distrustful of the Evernote tagging system.
My distrust of the tagging system did not prevent me from learning and storing boundless information. One learning strategy that I developed/explored to augment my current thinking with my PKB is making a what I like to call a “reactive summary.” Instead of simply summarizing the articles that I clipped into Evernote, I would summarize the article by including my own feelings toward the article or arguments that had come to my attention during reading the article. For example, instead of writing a summary such as, “Unions allow ineffective teachers to stay in power,” I would write, “the author incorrectly believes that unions are bad for schools, when this is not the case.” Although I often try to withhold my bias, when I insert that bias into my summary, it seems that I remember the article more clearly.
Although my strategy involved remembering articles by how I personally felt about them, sometimes it was frustrating when I could not find articles that said something beyond opinion. One thing that bothered me was that the majority of my PKB clippings were from political articles on Feedly.com. The PKB that was growing on Evernote because consistently full of opinion articles since I had to sift through so many political opinions in order to find my answer. I am always more interested in scientific or factual articles, and political articles can be very opinionated and emotional. I ended up reading and clipping a lot of articles from Feedly.com that got me upset or frustrated with damage being done to schools and to children’s lives due to something political. Also, it was unfortunate that I could not clip more articles and that I ran over my quota for the month in Evernote. I would like to continue to contribute to my PKB on Evernote, but I’m at a standstill unless I save everything onto my computer as I normally do. My original method before the use of evernote was to save work in folders on my laptop. This is very similar to Evernote’s notebooks, which allow you to name a file, save it in one place under a common name, and then stack the notebooks according to an overall topic. For example, I can name notebooks after all of the classes I will be taking in the Fall 2014, and then stack them under the common heading “Fall 2014 Classes.” Next I can clip articles about the different subjects and store the articles under that specific subject notebook (organizing method obtained from http://evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com/Organizing). This is very convenient. It is actually the same method that I use when I save work in folders onto my laptop. This made the transition to Evernote’s notebooks much easier because I could understand the method of organizing articles into notebooks.
The ability to organize my notes makes it easier to refer back to everything that I have learned so far, because it is in one place, and available with a few clicks of a button. I love the idea of maintaining cumulative knowledge. No matter what grade, more having more resources for knowledge is never a downside, because it allows people to use what others have done before them without “reinventing the wheel.” I think technology will allow all citizens who can afford it with the ability to store limitless resources in smaller spaces. Instead of accumulating mounds of paper and an entire library, we will be able to store tons of information in a smaller capacity, such as a hard drive. This will allow greater accumulation of knowledge, and at a much faster rate. People will be able to share that knowledge at the speed of the Internet and print at their leisure.
The dark side of all of this is that it will be more difficult than ever to hold students attention. People’s brains are stimulated by the novelty of technology because the flashing lights and quick access to information provide immediate rewards. If a teacher is trying to teach a lesson, it might make it more difficult for students to pay attention to the teacher talking, because there are no immediate rewards of information and the brain has to work harder to pay attention and tune out technological distractions.
As a result, it will be important to teach children about the use of this new technological knowledge base. For example, when I was in grade school, teachers would explain ways of organizing class tasks and homework into a binder and written planner. Now teachers might have to explain successful ways of organizing Internet articles and completing assignments on a computer, tablet or Smartphone.
Teachers will also have to teach about what makes an Internet article credible, and that plagiarism is against the law. It wasn’t until my high school years that I was taught about plagiarism and the difference between credible and non-credible Internet articles. Teachers will have to start teaching this information to younger children because the Internet is so readily available to everyone. The increased access and the cut and paste function of computers and the internet has the potential to create difficulty for teachers and stunt children’s learning if it is not used properly.
In conclusion, Evernote has been a helpful and innovative tool that helped me to organize notes for EDC 503. Even when I had to stop clipping articles, Evernote made me think more about the way in which I store and relate things, and how important it is to build up a working resource that I can refer to for information. Coupled with the techniques of summarizing articles in class, I have been able to reduce the stress that it takes to complete my assignments by having a catalog system of information.
Using a Personal Knowledge Base To Enhance Learning
I began saving my schoolwork in high school as a resource to refer back to in order to study. Saving my work was especially useful for my Spanish classes, which built more and more upon themselves as the years progressed. By saving my work I could look back at basic grammar concepts to correct my writing, and review a map of South America that I had made for a quiz in my first year taking Spanish. I could also review the vocabulary that I had learned, and reflect on how much knowledge I had accumulated and how much my Spanish had improved throughout the year.
It was not until college that a professor told my class that we should start accumulating a library of reference for my major. No teacher or professor had told me that I should save my textbooks and work as a resource, although I had been doing it since high school. Since high school I have amassed boxes of old papers and textbooks from past classes that take up space in my parent’s basement; this tends to be a source of tension between my parents and I when someone wants to find something stored between my boxes of schoolwork. Now that I have been introduced to Evernote, I think how convenient it would be if I could store my thousands of loose-leaf class papers in a neat little hard drive that takes up less space than Reign of Error.
Technology is the development of innovated tools that make tasks easier than they were before. When we think about the definition of education now, we might say that someone is knowledgeable at a particular subject. Before the use of computers, we may have had a different concept of what it meant to be educated. Technology has a way of innervating our lives and forcing us to co-adapt.
We can see now that without the up-to-date technology, it may be difficult to catch up when doing things the old fashioned way. For example, we now have the ability to dedicate tablets and phones specifically to reading, borrowing and purchasing books. We can turn pages with the flick of a button and we can save time on traveling to the bookstore. We have whatever we want, whenever we want it, in the palm of our hands. You can even bookmark books, change the font, and highlight directly on the screen. It would be much more difficult to travel to the library, borrow a book and then be restricted in the book’s use by a late fee. Not to mention it is more difficult to flip pages, and it is troublesome if you want to write a note or if you lose your bookmark.
Evernote is one of those technologies, like tablets, that uses innovative tools and the internet to make our lives much more convenient and increase the speed of acquisition of knowledge. It was a very helpful tool in this graduate course. I actually used Evernote less than I thought that I would have. I think that I wasn’t used to the note taking and reading style that Evernote allowed. Now that I see some of the things that I can do with this program, I imagine that it has boundless potential to help me in my future research and work. There is only one problem though: I have to purchase the program to do any more work! Evernote Web Clipper was especially useful because I could save everything I read and write a reaction summary to the articles. This allowed me to keep an online binder of all of the work that I had done, so that I could refer back to the work when I needed to cite something or remember something I had read.
As I became more comfortable with Evernote, I started clipping articles like mad. One of my weak points as a researcher is not being able to cite my sources and ideas. I clipped everything I had read because doing so helped me to feel secure that I had all of the knowledge at my fingertips. However, it was difficult for me to clip scholarly articles. They are so long that I worried about not getting every point in my summary. Also, I reached my max capacity in web clipper long before my research project, which deemed it rather unhelpful because I could not add my new information or scholarly articles.
- Describe your PKB's organizational scheme. How many notebooks have you created? What (if any) tags are you using? What uses (if any) have you discovered for note links?
While using Evernote helped me to hold all of my notes in one place, my PKB has not had a specific organizational scheme. The Context Report clippings that I would save always have a “CR – “ in front of the title so that I know that they are specific to the Context Report, and they will sort according to title in the Evernote library. General articles from my Personal Knowledge Base have a “PKB –“ in front of the title, so that they will group together. I normally retrace my articles by date or sometimes by title.When I first began using Evernote Web Clipper, I would add tags to my clippings. However, I found this to be more difficult because I had not built up a library and I was not sure how to organize it. I abandoned using tags because using the date that the article was clipped seemed easier to me. I was worried that Evernote would sort my clippings by the tags, but that the tags would either be unrelated or too related based on the tags. I guess you could say that I was distrustful of the Evernote tagging system.
My distrust of the tagging system did not prevent me from learning and storing boundless information. One learning strategy that I developed/explored to augment my current thinking with my PKB is making a what I like to call a “reactive summary.” Instead of simply summarizing the articles that I clipped into Evernote, I would summarize the article by including my own feelings toward the article or arguments that had come to my attention during reading the article. For example, instead of writing a summary such as, “Unions allow ineffective teachers to stay in power,” I would write, “the author incorrectly believes that unions are bad for schools, when this is not the case.” Although I often try to withhold my bias, when I insert that bias into my summary, it seems that I remember the article more clearly.
Although my strategy involved remembering articles by how I personally felt about them, sometimes it was frustrating when I could not find articles that said something beyond opinion. One thing that bothered me was that the majority of my PKB clippings were from political articles on Feedly.com. The PKB that was growing on Evernote because consistently full of opinion articles since I had to sift through so many political opinions in order to find my answer. I am always more interested in scientific or factual articles, and political articles can be very opinionated and emotional. I ended up reading and clipping a lot of articles from Feedly.com that got me upset or frustrated with damage being done to schools and to children’s lives due to something political.
Also, it was unfortunate that I could not clip more articles and that I ran over my quota for the month in Evernote. I would like to continue to contribute to my PKB on Evernote, but I’m at a standstill unless I save everything onto my computer as I normally do.
My original method before the use of evernote was to save work in folders on my laptop. This is very similar to Evernote’s notebooks, which allow you to name a file, save it in one place under a common name, and then stack the notebooks according to an overall topic. For example, I can name notebooks after all of the classes I will be taking in the Fall 2014, and then stack them under the common heading “Fall 2014 Classes.” Next I can clip articles about the different subjects and store the articles under that specific subject notebook (organizing method obtained from http://evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com/Organizing). This is very convenient. It is actually the same method that I use when I save work in folders onto my laptop. This made the transition to Evernote’s notebooks much easier because I could understand the method of organizing articles into notebooks.
The ability to organize my notes makes it easier to refer back to everything that I have learned so far, because it is in one place, and available with a few clicks of a button. I love the idea of maintaining cumulative knowledge. No matter what grade, more having more resources for knowledge is never a downside, because it allows people to use what others have done before them without “reinventing the wheel.” I think technology will allow all citizens who can afford it with the ability to store limitless resources in smaller spaces. Instead of accumulating mounds of paper and an entire library, we will be able to store tons of information in a smaller capacity, such as a hard drive. This will allow greater accumulation of knowledge, and at a much faster rate. People will be able to share that knowledge at the speed of the Internet and print at their leisure.
The dark side of all of this is that it will be more difficult than ever to hold students attention. People’s brains are stimulated by the novelty of technology because the flashing lights and quick access to information provide immediate rewards. If a teacher is trying to teach a lesson, it might make it more difficult for students to pay attention to the teacher talking, because there are no immediate rewards of information and the brain has to work harder to pay attention and tune out technological distractions.
As a result, it will be important to teach children about the use of this new technological knowledge base. For example, when I was in grade school, teachers would explain ways of organizing class tasks and homework into a binder and written planner. Now teachers might have to explain successful ways of organizing Internet articles and completing assignments on a computer, tablet or Smartphone.
Teachers will also have to teach about what makes an Internet article credible, and that plagiarism is against the law. It wasn’t until my high school years that I was taught about plagiarism and the difference between credible and non-credible Internet articles. Teachers will have to start teaching this information to younger children because the Internet is so readily available to everyone. The increased access and the cut and paste function of computers and the internet has the potential to create difficulty for teachers and stunt children’s learning if it is not used properly.
In conclusion, Evernote has been a helpful and innovative tool that helped me to organize notes for EDC 503. Even when I had to stop clipping articles, Evernote made me think more about the way in which I store and relate things, and how important it is to build up a working resource that I can refer to for information. Coupled with the techniques of summarizing articles in class, I have been able to reduce the stress that it takes to complete my assignments by having a catalog system of information.